Andrew Siegel, M.D.
“To guard is better than to heal, the shield is nobler than the spear!” Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Honor your pelvic floor–it has done a whole lot for you over the years.”
Restoration of the function of injured muscles is well established in the fields of sports medicine, orthopedics, plastic surgery and physical medicine and rehabilitation. A traumatized or injured muscle is treated with early active rehabilitation and muscle training to accelerate tissue healing and restore it back to working order.
Dr. Arnold Kegel popularized the application of this principle to the female pelvic floor muscles to improve muscle integrity and function in women after childbirth. Obstetrical trauma (9 months of pregnancy, labor and delivery of a 9 lb. baby out the vagina) can cause pelvic floor dysfunction. Pelvic floor dysfunction can cause incontinence (urinary and bowel control issues), pelvic relaxation (laxity of the vagina and its support tissues with descent of the pelvic organs including the bladder, uterus and rectum) and altered sexual function.
Likewise, this principle has been effectively applied to men with compromised pelvic floor muscle integrity and function in order to improve urinary, bowel, erectile, and ejaculatory health. Obviously, men do not suffer with the acute pelvic floor muscle trauma of childbirth that women do, but they can develop pelvic floor muscle dysfunction on the basis of aging, weight gain, a sedentary lifestyle, disuse atrophy, etc.
Don’t Allow Function to Become Dysfunction
Why not take a radically different approach and try to prevent pelvic floor dysfunction instead of fixing it? If you pardon the clichés, although “a stitch in time saves nine,” isn’t a better approach “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure?”. Obstacles to implementing this paradigm are our very reactive and repair-oriented medical culture that does a poor job of being proactive and promoting prevention and our patient population that often prefers fixing things that go awry as opposed to making the effort to prevent them from occurring in the first place. The concept of promoting wellness as opposed to treating diseases is one that resonates powerfully with me.
So, if obstetrical trauma to the pelvic floor often brings on pelvic floor muscle dysfunction and its urinary, gynecological and sexual consequences, why not start pelvic floor muscle training well before pregnancy? And if aging and other factors contribute to male pelvic floor muscle dysfunction and its urinary, bowel and sexual consequences, why wait for the system to malfunction? Why not bolster and strengthen the pelvic floor muscles when one is young, hale and hearty to prevent the age-related decline that is so often predictable? Many of us do apply preventive and proactive means to our health through regular exercise—aerobic for cardiovascular health and strength training to maintain muscle tone, integrity and function.
Whether male or female, the new paradigm is preventive pelvic health. The goal is to preclude, delay, or mitigate the decline in pelvic function that accompanies aging and that is accelerated by pelvic muscle trauma and injury, obesity and disuse atrophy.
Maintaining healthy sexual functioning is important because it contributes to masculine and feminine identity and behavior and has an impact that extends way beyond the sexual domain, permeating positively into many areas of life. Sexual dysfunction—at least to some extent—will eventually surface in most of us and the prospect of this is unsettling.
So, why passively accept the seemingly inevitable, when one can be proactive instead of reactive and can address the future problem before it becomes a current problem? Why wait until function becomes dysfunction? This is a commonly practiced approach for general physical fitness. We work out in the gym not only to achieve better fitness, but also to maintain fitness and prevent age-related losses in strength, flexibility, endurance, etc.
In this spirit, I encourage men and women who are enjoying excellent sexual and urinary health to maintain their pelvic health via preventive PFMT. This preemptive strategy is an opportunity for those who are healthy-functioning to continue enjoying their healthy functioning and prevent, delay and/or mitigate the age-related changes as best as they can.
Bottom Line: You have the ability to affect your own health destiny. Don’t be reactive and wait for your pelvic health to go south. Be proactive to ensure your continuing sexual, urinary and bowel health. If you wait for the onset of a dysfunction to motivate you to action, it may possibly be too late. Think about integrating a preventive PFMT program into your exercise regimen—it’s like a vaccine to prevent a disease that you hopefully will never get. As the saying goes: “Prepare and prevent, not repair and repent.”
Wishing you the best of health,
A new blog is posted every week. To receive the blogs in the in box of your email go to the following link and click on “email subscription”: www.HealthDoc13.WordPress.com
Note: As Arnold Kegel popularized pelvic floor muscle exercises in females in the late 1940’s, so I am working towards the goal of popularizing pelvic floor muscle exercises in males. This year I published a review article in the Gold Journal of Urology entitled Pelvic Floor Muscle Training in Men: Practical Applications to disseminate the importance and applications of these exercises to my urology colleagues. I wrote Male Pelvic Fitness: Optimizing Sexual and Urinary Health, a book intended to educate the non-medical population. I, along with my partner David Mandell and our superb pelvic floor team, co-created the Private Gym male pelvic floor exercise DVD and resistance program.
For more info on the book: www.MalePelvicFitness.com
For more info on the Private Gym: www.PrivateGym.com
Tags: Andrew Siegel MD, Arnold Kegel MD, bowel health, healthy sexual functioning, Male pelvic floor exercises, muscle restoration, obstetrical trauma, pelvic floor conditioning, pelvic floor dysfunction, pelvic floor muscle training, pelvic floor muscles, preventive medicine, preventive pelvic floor muscle training, preventive pelvic health, rehabilitation, urinary health'
Our Greatest Wealth Is Health 
Leave a Reply